Snarky refers to someone or something “irritable,” “sharply critical,” or “ill-tempered.” It goes back to a 19th-century word meaning “to snort.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Etymology of Snarky”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Charlene Seifert calling from Arlington, Texas.
Hi, Charlene.
Hi, Charlene.
Welcome.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Very well, thank you.
I’d like to talk about the word snarky and all of its various iterations.
Oh, yes.
And the reason for that is because I thought I had actually coined the word back in the 60s when we were in the military and my kids were 3 and 10.
And they’d get snotty and barky and ornery, and so I’d say quit being snarky.
And in the early 80s, when I became a trial attorney for the federal government, I bought myself a 300ZX and had snarky as my license plate from 82 to 85.
Nice.
And now, of course, I see it in all of its iterations, adverbs, adjectives, nouns.
So I looked it up, and all I could find was Lewis Carroll’s The Tale of the Snark.
So I leave it up to you to tell me if I really coined the word or if it was a real word before I started using it.
And how are you going to feel if it was already a word?
Not terrible. Amused more than anything else.
Oh, okay. All right.
The bad news is you didn’t coin the word. The good news is you can continue to keep using it.
Well, that’s good.
Is the tale of the snark the origin of it?
It isn’t. No, it actually isn’t.
It is a prominent usage, but it’s actually unrelated.
We consider that an etymological tributary.
It really doesn’t come into play in the history of this word.
In fact, it goes back to a verb snark from the mid-1800s that originally meant to snort or to snore.
Imagine that somebody does something that you disapprove of and you’re like kind of snorting at them like that.
That’s a snark.
So you do the snark.
The verb becomes to find fault with or to nag and then becomes the adjective to be snarky.
And here we are in the 2000s still using some forms of the word.
Well, apparently it wasn’t in really common usage because I’m an avid reader and I didn’t really see it used as much as it is today.
And starting, I guess, in the probably 2002, 2003 timeframe.
And that’s why I thought, well, they co-opted it.
It certainly is undergoing a heyday, isn’t it?
I think your sense of that is correct, that over the last couple decades, snark has become a well-known slang term.
But words do that. They ebb and flow. They have periods of revival and survival.
Sometimes they die out completely.
I often talk about the word chad from the Bush-Gore debacle with the Supreme Court and all that, the hanging chads, which is a word which had only really been used outside of the polling business, the election business, in like mills of cloth mills, textile mills.
And then there it was suddenly having this huge resurgence.
And snark, I think, in my mind, is heavily associated with the rise of the Internet.
Yes.
Particularly because there’s a kind of a particular Internet tone in which you talk to people where you’re kind of funny and kind of mean.
And that’s how I think about modern snark.
Okay.
Well, I really appreciate this because, as I say, I knew I wasn’t going to get into Merriam-Webster or any of the other dictionaries, but I just was amazed to see so many uses of it.
Well, the nice thing is you have spread this to your family, and they use the word because you used it, and that’s something.
Well, family, friends, and anybody who read my license plate, obviously somebody read it who didn’t like me because I quit using it in 1985 when the window of my car was shot out.
On the freeway going home, and that convinced me that it was either me as a trial attorney or the license plate, but I wasn’t going anywhere, so the license plate had to go.
Oh, man.
So now do you just have a random number on there, or do you have a different word?
No, I just have a random number on there.
Oh, okay.
All right.
The custom license plate is don’t shoot?
That’s not a bad idea.
If I could figure out how to abbreviate it, I just might.
Martha.
Thank you very, very much for your call, Charlene.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
You know, it’s interesting too, Grant.
We were having that conversation just a couple of episodes ago about words that start with S-N, right?
Like snooty and snobby.
Yeah, all related to the nose or something like that.
Snark.
I think of snark being one of those words, don’t you?
Yeah, well, it is.
If it comes from snort to snore originally, and then you do that particular—I didn’t do the noise very well, but you do that noise sometimes when you don’t like what was said or done, but you don’t want to use a word.
Yeah.
Like a—
Exactly.
Like that, right?
That’s it.
That’s a very good snark.
It’s not quite a harumph, though.
No.
No, it’s different from a harumph.
Yes.
A snark and a harumph are very different creatures.
Yes.
Different number of legs and eyes, for one thing.
You snarked very well there.
